Adding soft noise makes listeners perceive brilliance that is not actually present

Evidence

On the other hand, when re-mastering classic program material, e.g. recordings of the famous tenor Caruso, ultimate care has to be taken by the Tonmeister not to “clean” the original too perfectly. Many music enthusiasts miss the “brilliance” of Caruso’s voice, if the hiss noise is removed completely. In well controlled psychoacoustic experiments it could be shown that, when adding soft white noise to music low-pass filtered at 8 kHz, experts like sound engineers or professional musicians “hear” that the brilliance of the music increases despite the fact that in both presentations with or without soft background noise, the music contains only frequency components up to 8 kHz. Presumably the experts infer that (non-existent) high-frequency components of the music are masked by the added soft noise. On the other hand, the experts preferred the version without noise although they felt that in this version the music material lost its brilliance. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 2026

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to auditory illusions and expectation-driven perception; the perceived ‘brilliance’ from added noise parallels how expectation shapes perception elsewhere in perception studies. — connects to: Degrading music into audio-fog makes it more evocative rather than less — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 264
• SEED: An article angle: why the ‘clean’ remasters of classic recordings often disappoint audiophiles — a psychoacoustics explanation for nostalgia-driven sound preferences.
• QUESTION: Does the listener’s preference for the noise-free version despite its perceived loss of brilliance reflect a general pattern where objective quality and subjective appeal diverge?
• CANDY: Fun, tweetable: removing tape hiss from old recordings actually makes voices sound less brilliant and appealing, because listeners infer absent high frequencies were being masked.